Prophecy Defied: a tale of two worlds
by Darklooshkin
Summary: Gordon challenge. Sirius's mission was meant to only last six months. It ended up lasting fifteen years. But it's when it ends that his goddaughter's story truly begins.
1. Settling in

**A/N:** Well, it's yet another Whitetigerwolf challenge, this one being about Batgirl. I tried to ignore it, but then got bitchslapped by my imagination again, so here I am, writing this.

A few things to be aware of before starting to read this: Barbara was born in 1987 and the two arrive in Gotham in April-May of 1989 as a double blind, baby and decoy secret keeper both stashed safely away, half-way around the world while everyone but James and Lily believe them to be hiding out with or close to the Potters. Sirius believes that this was only a six-month assignment while James and Lily pretty much planned for the arrangement to last for as long as the war did. Voldemort, not finding the Potter girl at the Welsh Deathtrap, goes and attacks the Longbottoms to deal with a known quantity. The Longbottoms don't die and Neville is still stuck with them as vegetables, except that he now has the scar and the media after him at the same time. The Potters are just forgotten about. Sirius is assumed to have died with them, though the Goblins and some of the more observant American wizarding authorities know better... and don't plan on telling anyone. Neville goes through all the canon Hogwarts events but is only really introduced into the Gotham nightlife once i've figured out whether he's meant to be a villain or not. Just take canon Harry and stick Neville in his stead, an emotionally stunted grandmother and a mad scientist unspeakable grand-uncle taking the place of the Dursleys. Same emotional scarring, more mad skillz to use against Voldie. But that's background for the first few chappies. Now, it's growing up Gotham style for the little Prophecy-Girl-That-Wasn't.

**Disclaimer**: Do not own, do not really care, having fun, come along for the ride.

* * *

_One can only move heaven by courting hell._

Excerpt from _Gotham Alley; an eyewitness account._

Seventy years ago, Wayne Enterprises was a growing building and infrastructure-oriented company gearing up for America's official involvement in World War 2. Like many of its ilk, the company dealt with a bunch of small-time, one-off contracts when dealing with the Armed Forces, often building things like airfields, dockyards and roads to and from bases dotted across both the north and south American coastline.

Then, in 1943, a new project came from an undisclosed department in the US military. Wayne Enterprises hit the big time with this one and made the jump to becoming Wayne Industries on the back of it. The project was, put simply, to build a fully featured barracks/command centre that could be used by any branch of the US Army, Navy, Air Force or 'Special Services' that cared to use it. This included a camouflaged airstrip, a medium-sized docking yard, training grounds capable of turning recruits into soldiers, Marines and Sailors, a communications array, radar network and defensive positions that would defend the base from an attacking force ten times the size of the base's capacity of fifteen thousand men.

* * *

Wayne Industries was, at the time, far from the perfect company to turn to for this project, except for two things: first, it had a well-deserved reputation for secrecy under pressure, having built government facilities with a minimum of fuss and leakage in the past. Second, their headquarters was sitting slap-bang in the middle of the construction zone. Put simply, Wayne Industries was tasked with building this monstrosity in the middle of Gotham City. Alexander Wayne, always a fan of both the efficient use of resources and Occam's razor, fielded what at the time seemed like a peculiar solution to this problem. The docking yards and the airstrip would be built as any other military airstrip and naval ship yard, but with a thin veneer of civil use painted over it. Everything else, the defensive positions, warehouses, training grounds, barracks, housing for the soldier's families, the mess halls, the science labs, the entertainment venues etcetera etcetera etcetera would be built underground. The above-ground portions of the base were connected via pre-existing maintenance tunnels whose only indication that anything had changed was an extra blast door or two at the lowest point of the shafts themselves.

* * *

Work started in March 1943. On January of 1945, a quiet opening ceremony took place with the mayor of Gotham, Alexander Wayne and an unnamed, non-descript man of uncertain descent wearing a gray business suit attending. And if the man offered no details about himself, everybody understood and nothing further was spoken about the matter. It was a different time, after all. All the personnel involved in the construction were sworn to secrecy and, if any Gothamites took notice of the strange events that occurred from late 1943 to late 1944, nobody commented on it. Gotham was already well-known for its 'don't ask, don't tell' approach to mystery solving and rarely batted an eye when something not quite kosher occurred under any circumstances. A few memories lingered after the end of the war, but even they disappeared when the last of the skeleton crew was reassigned to more modern facilities at the outbreak of the cold war. After all, nobody knew if it could stand up to a Soviet nuclear bomb, and it wasn't like anyone was too eager to find out at the time.

So, underneath the streets of Gotham, lower than its subway stations, sewage network and pipelines filled with the obscure and rather toxic lifeblood the city ran on, a small, fully furnished city lay to rot for twenty years. Then, in the seventies, a fugitive bank robber stumbled upon it. Having somehow managed to bypass all the deadlocks, tank traps and silent machine gun posts in his head-long dash away from the police, he looked up and found himself on what he first assumed to be a film set. Three months later, his old pals got an invitation. The Underworld town of Dante was born.

Then the recession hit. With it, a massive crime wave swept the streets of Gotham clean of what was once a bustling middle class. In its wake, the shops closed, workers left, once proud street corners filled up with the destitute and unwanted, the policemen found policing to be difficult and, in the end, Gotham Alley, once the go-to shopping district for Salem students, closed up shop and moved to Boston. Put simply, during the recession, the magic died.

Dante, on the other hand, became a boomtown like many of the other US cities. While Gotham existed in this sort of strange depressive bubble, the rest of the US was high on junk bonds, cocaine and a floundering Soviet Union fighting the 'freedom fighters' in the Afghan highlands. Drug Barons, Arms dealers, shady middlemen of the international variety flocked to Gotham City looking for cheap labour and even cheaper secure warehousing. You could buy the entire police force for a tenth of what it cost to nab yourself a Miami chief of police. None of the landlords bothered to make the trip back to Gotham to look at housing estates that were now worth pennies to the dollar it had cost to build them, meaning that the bolder squatters simply picked a house and bribed the local real estate agent to file false reports and set up water & electricity supplies. Hell, the girls were so cheap there, the porn industry in Gotham could easily have rivalled California's... if the various companies had ever bothered to file financial statements.

Gotham City was a free-for-all, with the only light in the city coming from the gargantuan art-deco obelisk holding Wayne Industries. Even as the flanks broke and routed, somehow, the centre held. When Wayne Senior was killed following a performance on the steps of the still somehow world-famous Gotham Grand Theatre, the centre held. When Bruce showed less and less promise at being the renowned industrialist and shrewd businessman his father had been, still the centre held. Nevertheless, those ensconced in the marble, glass and somewhat ivory tower knew that, sooner or later, something had to give.

And into that mess wandered a strangely dressed man clutching a baby girl in one hand and a briefcase in another.

_Gotham Alley; an eyewitness account, pages 15-17, "Where most of it started."_

* * *

**Chapter 1: Settling in.**

They always said that the future was bright. Something to look forward to, to relish, to anticipate. But when what you saw as The Future was right in front of you...

The train station had been clean, at least. That was a blessing of sorts to your average traveller, who tended to grow up in places where clean public spaces had become something of a luxury as of late. The streets, on the other hand, were a completely different matter. One could smell the tension in the air, the stench of nerves, anxiety and, dare one say it, a little bit of fear. The tall buildings sprouting out of the ground like monolithic mushrooms seemed to hem in any pedestrian caring to look up, hoping to catch a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off the forbidding glass facades that characterised the upper reaches of the towers stretching in a straight line beyond the perceived curve of the horizon. The atmosphere, foreboding as it was, was only made worse by the pitch-black tint of the lower level windows, seeming to suck up any light that touched it before it could reach the ground. It was like standing in a shoal of small fish trying to escape a feeding frenzy; everybody hustling, bustling and wanting to get away from something, most likely the very atmosphere their nerves were helping to perpetuate.

In the middle of all this stepped a young man with strange eyes and a weary scowl that talked of deep exhaustion, a bundle of blankets with a tuft of red hair sticking out of it in one hand and a non-descript black leather briefcase in another. To him, the fear, borderline panic and suppressed anger at, if he were forced to take a guess, everything, had the tang of familiarity about it. He'd experienced it often enough in one form or another, been the cause of it a number of times himself and was mostly a distant observer of such feelings when it came to others. He could live with it. Barbara, on the other hand... He just hoped he had time to check into the house that had been set up in advance before she woke up. Setting a brisk pace, he never noticed the tuft of hair poking out even further, revealing a face (so much like her mother's that it made the man's heart ache) that was staring up at the metal and marble behemoths towering above them in something akin to awe.

* * *

"Evans residence."

"Miss Evans?"

"Yes?"

"This is-" _Sirius Black _almost slipped out of his mouth"-Castor Grey from the Primal Colours Credit Union. Can you pass a message on to Lily Evans-Potter for me please? It's urgent."

"Uh, sure. Just wait a moment while I go and fetch a notepad please." A slight clonk could be heard as Rose put down the phone. Sirius waited patiently for the lady to fetch whatever it was that needed fetching, absently drumming the table in a four beat rhythm he'd heard during one of Lily's muggle studies crash courses ('_how to pass as a muggle. Lesson one: Doctor Who_') and wondering how long this six month-long game of 'hide the baby from the murderous psychos' would subjectively last. He perked up as he heard a faint rustle on the other end of the line. "Right, go ahead."

"Please tell her that her transaction has been finalised without any issues and that she will receive the returns on investment after the six months are up."

"Right. Got that."

"Thank you, Miss Evans. Is it alright if we keep using this number as Miss Evans-Potter's emergency contact? Only, we seem to have mislaid her phone n-"

"Suresuresure! Don't worry, she'll get the message!"

Sirius smiled to himself at a prank well-pulled. You could always count on Lily's mom to be highly paranoid when it came to her darling Lily's little magical quirks. It may have been petty, childish, cruel and just a tad asinine, but he was jet-lagged, still slightly hungover from his temporary farewell bender and beyond pissed that he'd been put in this situation in the first place.

"Brilliant. Have a nice day, Miss Evans." the phone clicked as it was put back on its receiver. He was far from being as lost in the muggle world as he would have been before Barbara's birth, the year of intensive Lily-tutoring had seen to that. Well, that and when compared to being trained, needled, harrassed and pushed on a plane by his two best friends with their daughter in his hands, a pureblood knowing how to use a phone was the least baffling thing about this whole situation. He sighed, reminding himself that, if this protected Barbara from the ravages of prophecy and daft old men with more power than sense, then it would all be worth it. But still.

A shrill wail came from the baby room the Potter funds had kindly arranged to have installed in the rather snug apartment. He went to check on his goddaughter, a smile punching right through his sulk.

* * *

He took a cab back home, little Barbara sleeping away on his lap. He'd changed an awful lot in the last six months. He'd gone from a quiet, polite, clean-shaven graduate to a mustachioed clerk with a cowslick hairdo, a long jacket covering the pinstripe suit he'd worn to work today. It had been his last day of hustling and bustling around the office of Dunbar & Associates, having handed in his resignation letter two weeks ago. He no longer needed the cover his work afforded him, since today was the eleventh of November. Armistice day, the day where he would finally be able to call home and get the all clear to come back. He smiled at thinking about seeing his friends & impromptu family again, imagining the whitened fields and dark-blue sky of a deep Welsh winter as he stared out at the Gotham cityscape. God, to be back home! To be around those he'd missed. To finally be able to do _magic_ again! Back before this little trip to the States, he would have jumped in joy and promptly hit his exuberant brainpan against the car's top, waking up little Barb and pissing off the driver in the process. Now, he just looked forward to getting on a plane, setting down at Heathrow and stopping by Greasy Joe's on the way back home for a full-on English breakfast at midnight.

The little girl in his lap increased her grip on him, the hug starting to bruise his ribcage. She was a strong little bugger. He didn't mind.

* * *

"They are dead, Mister Grey." Sirius fell onto the floor, his ass connecting with a large whump.

* * *

"Moony? Moony, it's me, Padfoot. Moony, _pick the fucking mirror up right the fuck now!_"

He stopped screaming at the mirror, hurrying towards Barbara's faint cries coming from the other room in a panic. She was all that was left of his former life now. None of his friends were answering his calls, all reported either dead or missing according to whoever picked up the phone. She was his responsibility now. His daughter. It was not a matter of being her godfather either; it's simply that there was no-one else left. He was afraid now.

* * *

A few thousand kilometres away, Remus Lupin is administered the Kiss for the murder of 13 muggles and Peter Pettigrew. The Aurors found him chowing down on the rat animagus's remains. He had no regrets.

Close by, a witch with a rather put-upon expression brought her two year old grandson, the one hailed as the boy who lived, to meet his parents. The two people on the bed didn't recognise them.

* * *

A few days later, Sirius Black emerged from his funk, strangely because he realised that there was no more milk left in the fridge.

The plan was shot to hell, he knew that. He didn't know what had happened to his friends, he didn't know how the war was going, he had no means of finding out and there was no way in hell that he would endanger his god-daughter by haring off to wherever it is the American wizards hung out these days in order to catch up on things. Above all else, the Black funds he'd pilfered from his neglected old trust vault would barely last a week, he didn't know how long the Potter Gringott's account would continue to ply his numbered account with funds and the money from his old job was going to disappear fast.

So, he built a list.

First, he needed a new job.

Second, he needed a new job.

Third, _he needed a new job_.

So the list was rather short. Huh. What could he do with this cover identity of his?

* * *

Sirius bit back a curse as he looked at the classifieds. Obviously, something strange was going on in the jobs market in Gotham. He'd re-applied for the clerk position he'd just left, only to be told in no uncertain terms that the company could no longer afford to recruit people. And now that he looked at the paper, he found nothing, zilch, nada, niente, rien, zero, no jobs that he had even a modicum of experience in.

What the hell? He'd been gone _two weeks_. Granted, Gotham was in the midst of a record-breaking recession, but most of the companies he was looking for jobs in did business in other parts of the US. What was going on?

Then he looked at the local business section of the paper and cursed. Loudly. Vehemently. Continuously. He'd heard about the mini-crash from last month, but he'd had _no idea _that it had had such an effect on Gotham. Every single financial and legal firm seemed to have had its fingers firmly lodged deep in the junk bonds pie. With that market gone for now, most financial companies in Gotham faced bankruptcy. While Wayne enterprises was buying up as many minor brokerage houses as it could afford, the vast majority of legal & financial firms were shoved out into the cold right now. No more relatively well-paying positions were to be had. 1989 seemed to be the year where the Universe decided to make one Sirius Black its bitch.

He sighed, once again firmly pulling himself out of his self-induced sulk and attacking the classifieds & ads section with renewed vigour. He found what he was looking for at the very back of the paper. 'Join the Gotham Police Force. Insurance & Salary guaranteed on recruitment.' Well, suspiciously worded, but he did have experience with criminals & psychopaths. He grew up with some of the worst of them, after all.

He sighed to himself, sipping on his coffee. Barbara would need to be picked up from kindergarten soon.

* * *

January 1990 held auspicious beginnings for one James Peter Gordon. Dressed to the nines, he enrolled in the Gotham State Police Academy. After making sure that Barbara was well cared for by the babysitter, he took the bus (he didn't dare touch the piggy bank and hail a cab anymore) and left the limits of Gotham City for the first time in close to nine months, excitement, apprehension and a blasé attitude vying for attention.

* * *

"Dada!" The little green-eyed redhead screamed, pouncing from somewhere behind the doorway. He picked her up and twirled her around, her excited giggling mixing with his relieved chuckles.

"Well look who we have here." Alicia Kyle said, her back against the corridor wall. "What's up, officer?"

"Heh." he offered, a lazy grin adorning his moustachioed face. "Just checking in, ma'am." The dress uniform of a newly minted policeman itched. He really didn't care at this point.

* * *

Her name was Alicia Kyle, 25 years old, sister to one Selina and Jeremy Kyle, daughter of Hadrian and Annette Kyle, one meter eighty three, Barbara's former babysitter who was willing to look after Pumpkin for him when he was working late, youngest manager of the Gotham Archives department and unofficial mother figure to Barbara Anne Gordon nee Potter.

He was currently staring at her upper torso, trying to look for clues everywhere whilst avoiding the look of surprise and fear on her face. Her legs lay twenty five metres away from her body, the odd twitch still visible an hour after the 'accident'. That was it; torso on one side of the road, legs on the other and what looked like a swimming pool's worth of blood everywhere else.

How was he going to explain this to Barbara?

* * *

Four-year-old Barbara was crying. He could hear pain, anger and rage in the little voice of hers. A picture of Miss Kyle's blood-covered face was splashed over the front page. The late babysitter's empty-eyed gaze followed him to sleep that night. Turns out he never had to tell Barbara. Alicia had taught her how to read.

* * *

The new nanny came to him one night.

"Mister Gordon?"

Even after two and a half years, it still took a tick too long to register that she was talking to him.

"Yes?"

"It's about your daughter."

He sighed, the initial panic reflexes he'd had when his daughter (and she _was_ his daughter now, damnit) became a conversation subject in the early days now buried under a layer of occlumency he'd spent the past six years working on. It was wonky, it was fragile, it did its job. "Go on."

"Well... She keeps asking after Alicia."

"Ah, yes. She was Barbara's first babysitter. She died a few months ago."

"And the mother?" The lady asked, having seen no photos of the girl's mother anywhere in the house.

"Dead. Gas main explosion two years ago."

"I am sorry for bringing that up."

"No problem. I still attend grief counselling sessions every now and then, so I've gotten used to it."

"Still..." And there the woman nibbled her lip nervously, an easy tell that she was about to bring up something unpleasant. "I think that maybe young miss Gordon should see a professional as well, sir."

His heart skipped a beat. He had dreaded this possibility. "Why do you say that?" He winced internally at the harsh sound that sounded so much like his own father's. Externally, he forced himself to relax and drop the scowl a bit. "Please, tell me. None of this will impact your continued employment with me, I swear." He hoped that the girl didn't see the flash of magic the Minor Vow gave off.

"A-alright. Ever since I've come here, she's been distant. Not just to me, mind" she fidgeted, addressing a possible protest avenue "but to everyone. I talked to a few people that knew her from before when I pick her up at the kindie's. She used to be such a sweet and open girl... Now the most anyone's gotten out of her is a drawing." She took something out of her back, holding it up to him, prompting him to take it. "This drawing."

He took it in trembling hands, wondering what he would find when he unfolded it.

A stick figure lay on the ground, the upper body separated from the lower one by a tire track. The ground was coloured in red. Underneath it were the words 'Best Friend' done in yellow crayon. He dropped the paper.

* * *

He burrowed through the archives of the police station, focusing on 'Hit & Run, Jan. 1991- Dec. 1992 - current'.

He didn't find what he was looking for.

"Hey, Darmhurst."

"Yeah?"

"_Legilimens_".

Thankfully, the investigating officer knew a little bit more about the situation.

* * *

"Detective?"

"Yeah-oh, Corporal Gordon. What can I do for you today?"

He dropped a file on the detective's desk, the pictures of Alicia spilling all over the place.

"You can tell me just why this is a hit and run _when nobody can find any tire marks._"

"I don't know fucking know, now do I!"

"Yes, well obviously. Read the file." The detective frowned and opened the Manila cover. Inside were witness statements, sworn affidavits and details on the locations of a dozen security cameras that could have captured the action. Nothing on who owned, operated or taped them, but a start, at least.

"That's not the file I was given. Where did you find this?"

His expression did not change. "Down in the records department, Sir." _alongside the details on who bribed Riefenstahl to keep quiet, but that's up to you to find out._

"I see. Well thank you, corporal Gordon. I'll take it from here."

When he was sure that he'd put enough distance between him and the slimeball that was now officially on record as having received the correct dossier, Sirius allowed himself a rictus that would have made anyone who knew Jim Gordon shit their pants. The Black Blood was boiling again and the list of prisoners to be taken had been lost en route.

* * *

It took a little bit of behind-the-scenes anonymous prodding of several law enforcement and media officials, but the hunt was finally on. He'd kept his magic to a minimum for everyone except the editor of the Gotham Daily, whom he had given a good, late night hexing for daring to piss all over Alicia's memory the way the paper had. He'd even stayed as far away from the investigation as was possible, only dropping in out of the blue when needed, procuring this piece of evidence or exposing that piece of trash 'potential witness' whose payday had been a lot higher than it was supposed to be and just keeping a close eye on the investigation in general.

Now came the wait. He started to take on as many patrols in the old middle class suburbs as he possibly could which, thanks to the confundus charm he'd placed on the roster sheet, was a lot. Listening to his partner's bitching, you'd have thought that he'd confunded the roster to have them patrol the moon.

* * *

The first few sessions between Barbara and the paedopsychologist went fairly well, until one day Barbara had been asked to go play in the waiting room's playpen for a while.

"Well mister Gordon, I can honestly say that you dodged quite the bullet by bringing her here." Jason Bauer said, scribbling something in a notebook as he talked to him. "Abandonment issues, fear of death, fear of loss, fear of pain... She was shaping up to be _quite_ the hermit back there." The man's bright brown eyes bore right into his silvery blue ones, disapproval writ large. "Well, I can honestly say that while the list of issues she has is nothing to sneeze at and that I expected better from one of our city's law enforcement officers, she is going to be alright. But!" He said as he saw corporal Gordon lifting himself out of his seat in relief. "She needs more time with her father. She needs more time with you, Mister Gordon. She needs to know that you are there, that you are NOT going away and what her mother was like."

"What? Her mother? But-"

"But what, Mister Gordon? The whole reason she latched onto Miss Kyle was because she knew nothing about her mother. She had even started thinking of her as her secret Mom. Her death... Was seen as confirmation that her mommies all left her before she was ready for them to go. She needs you, Mister Gordon, but she also needs her mother, even if it's only in memories."

All Black could do at that point was nod.

* * *

They caught the guy, but corporal Gordon was conspicuously absent from the action. Jim had been taking little Barbara for a walk in the local park at the time. He looked up as a dozen squad cars sped by, pursuing the car that he'd seen on CCTV footage less than a week ago. Sirius wanted to charge after them and _hurt_ the bastard who'd dared to hurt his little girl, however indirectly. But James Gordon, newly minted police corporal and single dad, was spending time with his little girl. Nothing was more important than that.

* * *

"And can you tell the court just who paid you to... perform this service?" The young assistant DA asked, his first court appearance dissipating any dumb blonde comments that were thrown his way after turning down a job at his uncle's prestigious lawfirm.

"Well..." The young man said in the box, his hands pressed together as if he was sitting in a confessional which, in a way, he guessed he was. "The guy's name was-"

The tinkle of broken glass was the only indication that something was wrong. That, and the rather large pool of blood and cranial matter now decorating the floor behind the erstwhile accused. This marked the last time Gotham's courts used this courtroom when trying murder cases.

* * *

"Corporal Gordon, can I talk to you for a second?"

With those innocuous words, James Gordon underwent a chain of events that ended with him staring at a new badge and permission to take time off in order to study and formally qualify as a detective. Funny how life works. Sirius had been thinking of resigning before this.

* * *

"Daddy, look what I can do!" the little girl squealed, carrying her six-year-old body higher and higher in the air. Sirius just looked on, mumbling an old tune as she kept driving the swing ever upwards.

_And the swing keeps swinging, swinging, swinging._

He looks on as Barb is level with the swing bar.

_And the kids scream higher, higher, higher._

He frowns, seeing that she is concentrating on something as she rockets past him.

_But what must go **uuuuuuup **must then come down._

At the top of the arc, he almost screams as he sees her _let go..._ and stops when he sees her floating back to the ground.

She's in his arms before he's even aware he'd moved, hyperventilating at the thought of what would have happened had she failed. She giggles and hugs him tightly. "See Daddy? I can do magic tricks! I'm a magician!"

"No darling." He says, still catching his breath from having broken the magical all-time land speed record to get to her. "You're a witch." He can't be mad at her for this, but he'll probably ground her out of principle for doing something so stupid, reckless... James would probably have been proud.

The little girl put on a disgusted moue. "But witches are ugly."

Sirius snickers at her. "No dear, witches are pretty. It's the hags that are ugly."

"But aren't witches hags?" She asks, setting off a muffled rant about Tudor-era bards and their bloody ignorance.

"No dear, they're not. They're pretty and generally don't eat people."

"Ah, okay then. I'm a witch! Witch! Witch! Witch! Witch! Witch!"

He knelt down in front of her, looking her in the eye. "I know sweetie, but you can't tell anyone, okay? It's our little secret."

She looked around, seemingly considering the question with an 'mmmm'. "mmmmokay!" She skipped in place as she said it and Sirius extended his right hand in front of her, the smallest digit wriggling in place.

"Pinky promise?"

Suddenly looking completely and utterly serious, not to mention appalled that he'd called for such a strong bond, the girl used her little finger to hook onto his little finger and shook both of them up and down. "Pinky promise."

He smiled at her, took her hand and the two of them walked home.

* * *

Barbara looked at the thin wooden rod her Daddy had gotten her, curious about what it really was and why Daddy had insisted on taking her to that strange shop to get one. She didn't know what to make of it.

Daddy said it was a wand, but she knew that wands were all sparkly and cute and had stars on the end of them. This thing was a dark, ratty, foreboding thing that still managed to feel like one of her teddy bears at the same time. How such a strangely revolting wand could still make her feel all warm and fuzzy inside... it was creepy. It just felt wrong to her. So she decided to just use her hands instead.

"Wingardium Leviosa!" the high-pitched voice squealed again and again and again, willing for the rock in front of her to move. It was easy to do with the wand, but she wanted to do magic without needing to resort to using one, so she needed to do this. She didn't really know how to do it right, so she just did it like she would using the magic stick. It's not like anybody would hear her in the attic anyway.

She shouted the spell again, thinking about how it would feel to pick up the object, push it upwards and play with it. It didn't work.

Getting frustrated, she shoved her hand, palm out, towards the rock sitting on the floor, roaring the incantation as she did so. All of a sudden, she felt as if something _heavy _was pushing down upon her and almost yelped in surprise. Looking around sluggishly for the source of extra weight, she panicked and balked backwards, her back hitting the wall of the attic in the process.

A small _thump_ reaced her ears, making her look in the direction of the noise instinctively. There the rock lay, its uneven edges causing the thing to sway side by side as the force of impact dissipated. A small dent marked the point where the rock had hit the floorboards after seemingly falling from a great height. She had done it.

* * *

**A/N:** Right, next stop, Dad Sirius, puberty and Gotham High.


	2. Having a bad day

Chapter 2: Bad day all round

A/N: This is the last of the set-up chapters, so please gentlemen, don't be _too_ disappointed. The action starts next chapter. I'll try to keep it _noir_ after this, but fluffiness and sentimentalism lurk here, so beware.

**Disclaimer: Batman? Not mine. Harry Potter? Not mine either. Kwan Li? Is one awesome dude, and you should totally read some of his stuff. He helped a brother out and writes good fics, what more do you want? Oh, and whitetigerwolf deserves some of your lovin' for his challenges and cool fics too, so just mosy on over while you're at it.**

**Oh, and The Mad Mad Reviewer had "Jamie Evans and Fate's Bitch" taken down, which he reposted under "Jamie Evans and Fate's Fool". If you haven't read it, go do so. It's one of the more awesome Fem!Harry/timetravel/original fics out there and some of the ideas are just gold. Review his stuff!**

* * *

Gotham City is an odd city. A small settler's fishing village that turned into a shipping town when mineral deposits were discovered close by, bolstered by a boom period as industry started to loosen the craftsmen's chokehold on the production of goods. The area is still at the heart of Gotham today, serving as both the historical centre and seat of government for its citizens. Then came the civil war.

In its aftermath, a new wave of immigrants flooded Gotham as people looked for work and leisure opportunities. Instead of converting older houses and tenancies, the city decided to have a number of low-income houses built. These houses are still there today, albeit with the filthy appartments gutted and replaced by boutique hotels and high earnings potential start-up company offices.

As the immigrants settled in and their offspring started their own businesses, factories sprouted up around the city, sparking an influx of financial & transportation companies looking to capitalise on what was then one of America's most overlooked boomtowns. More immigrants, mining workers looking for cheap housing and the less successful members of the settled Gothamites clamoured for cheaper housing. So, once again, on the outer edge of the new industrial area, low-income housing started to sprout up. This is now the financial center of Gotham.

Then came the first world war. With a large portion of its working population off to fight the Hun, the factories operated at half-strength, the financial companies were busy juggling lower than expected profits , the demands of a wartime economy and having most of their more promising new blood being sent to fight in the trenches in France and on the plains of Africa. Nobody thought much of it at the time, but that one year of fighting left the banks and investment companies a lot weaker than it appeared on the surface. The credit boom of the 1920s made it worse even as the cheap money fuelled what were some of Gotham City's most ambitious and colossal buildings yet.

Gotham is an extravagant City, full of grandiose, multi-level greenhouses, parkland nestled between buildings and skyscrapers that have more in common with a cathedral than with any normal concept of geometry.

The financial crisis of the 1930s finished off Gotham's industrial growth phase. The buildings, factories and warehouses still stand today, with the outer edge of development during the 1930s marking the boundary between the old City and the one that grew in the wake of the second world war. Sure, the city kept on growing after that, but that area is notable for one thing; if you pass overhead, you can clearly see how old Gotham is. Like the rings in a tree, Gotham City's various eras are clearly defined by both the colour of the buildings and the 'grain', namely their relations in terms of size, to each other. Bar Wayne Industries' tower and the various buildings built in the historical heart of Gotham for civic & judicial purposes, new buildings springing up inside this historical area is the exception rather than the rule. And when they do redevelop an area, like with the skyscrapers now dominating what was once the Storage Area of Gotham City, the entire old historical area is redeveloped.

Gotham is a large city that wears her age with pride. And because the price of tearing down & building something new is a lot higher than anywhere else, but nobody mentions that.

This does not just hold above ground. Underneath the layer of asphalt & concrete, Gotham is a literal swiss cheese. The sewage network, started back in the first days of industry, now rivals the subway station in terms of size. A phase where low-cost tenements were built with more of a down than an up emphasis has given rise to something unique to Gotham; subterranean hotels. Factories dealing with the more dangerous chemicals and products decided, once upon a time, to locate their more dangerous processes underground. What is commonly known as Gotham's Mad Science era left the underground parts of the city riddled with strange architectural creations and dusty labs whose blast doors have remained unopened since the 30s. A common saying amongst Gothamites is 'when working in the basement, don't jump.' Even today, a large portion of the area outside the City Rings features a lot of lively underground development. Though for what purpose remains fairly vague.

Gotham is, truly, an odd City. One of the largest, most vibrant and hazardous pieces of strange you're likely to ever come across.

_Excerpt from America's Undiscovered Treasures; the ring of Oddness: three cities you've never heard of, but should have._

* * *

_Dear Miss Potter, _

_you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry..._

It would have changed little Barbara Gordon's world to have read this letter. Unfortunately, Owls are not known for their ability to cross the Atlantic, magical or not.

* * *

_Miss Gordon, _

_Your candidacy for entry into the Gotham Academy for Young Girls of Talent has been accepted. Please accept this offer with my most sincere congratulations. _

_Hoping to hear from you soon, _

_Diana Windermere, Headmistress._

Sirius Black woke up to his surrogate daughter's squeal of delight. Wandering into the foyer to find out, he was promptly rugby-tackled by an eleven year old that was almost as tall as her rather short father had been.

"Daddy, Daddy! I've been accepted into the Gay Academy!" she exclaimed, excited at the prospect of attending one of the most exclusive schools in the city and laughing at the look of shock he showed. Acronyms were such delightful things.

* * *

_Dear Miss Carter,_

_I respectfully decline Miss Potter's invitation to attend the Salem Academy of the Magical Arts, as she is already in the fourth year equivalent program for the ICW's standard intensive home-schooling program. Also, her mother specifically stated that Miss Potter would receive a contemporary non-magical education that would allow her to conduct further studies in her chosen field at the tertiary education level. In both respects, attending your institution would likely do more harm to her future education and career options than good._

_Sincerely,_

_Barbara's guardian, Lieutenant James Gordon._

Sirius let out a sigh. He would have to step up Barbara's training soon. Dodging whatever magical criminals stayed after Gotham Alley shut down was going to be a lot harder otherwise.

* * *

Sirius looked at the lead story splashed across the front page. "_Gotham City Mutual Bank robbed in broad daylight; municipal budget gone!_"

He could hear his boss working himself up towards one of his more epic rants as he reached for the aspirin that was hidden underneath a stack of blank expense reports. The headache he was going to be sporting as soon as that phone call was over promised pain. And Lieutenant Gordon knew that, out of all the things a cop heard on the job, the anticipatory wimper coming from the frontal lobes made it a sure bet.

Well, the decision had been taken from him. Babs was going to get some tutoring before getting trained in some of the more questionable Black Magic. No way Jim would be able to investigate this in the proper muggle manner and get a hyper twelve-year-old to listen to him for longer than five minutes in the same day.

* * *

_Six years later:_

"Well, aren't you a ray of sunshine today."

Jim looked up from his newspaper at the girl who never shut up in the morning. "And what's it to you?"

"Dunno, just, you know." She waved her hand around the place. "making conversation." She smiled at him, the Gordon Scowl doing little to impress her.

"If this is about me grounding you..."

"Oh no, nothing about that." She reassured him lamely. "It's about what happened last night."

"Use your wand, girl." He was still scowling at her. She was still smiling like her father did when Snape wasn't paying attention. Not good. She was up to something.

"What? Did I- oh, it seems I _did_ forget it in my room again!" She giggled. "Silly me!" This, it was to be noted, didn't stop her from waving her hand a few more times, depositing bread in the toaster, starting a new pot of coffee and making herself a bowl of muesli all at the same time.

"Yeah yeah, brag about it all you want lazybones." He sipped his coffee. "You're still grounded." Put coffee down. Ruffle newspaper. Ignore teen daughter giving you weird vibes until stepmom shows up.

One thing was for sure, Babs had gotten Lily's snort down pat somehow. "And you've still not told me what made you go haring off like a mad bastard in the middle of the night."

"The Joker." He looked for the business section of the paper, fighting the desire to light up a cigarette before he'd even finished his coffee. "He escaped."

Sigh. "Again?" Her voice, so energetic and full of life seconds ago, sounded so _tired_ all of a sudden. "And why do they always call you to do something about the guy?"

Gordon lowered the newspaper a tad, taking a hard look at his daughter. "Because I'm the only cop on the force to have arrested him and survived the experience. That-" _clink_. Toast was ready. Finally. "-and I _am_ the commissioner around here."

Babs buried her head in her hands. "How did he escape this time?"

"He had help. A Harleen Quinzel broke her out."

"Nah! Harleen 'the Queen'?" She had his full attention now. Though the toast in front of her could make the same claim. How did she do that?

"You know her?"

She grinned. "Do I? She was a total bitch to me and the others back in Junior High! We partied when she transferred out of the Gotham Academy." Her smile turned sober again. "So she's a crim now? She really didn't seem like one of those."

"That's because she isn't. The Joker brainwashed her. And don't use the B-word in front of Gabrielle later on, okay?" The crunch crunch of toast consumption met his ears.

"How?" Barbara asked in her near-desperate voice again. He looked at her, paper and breakfast temporarily forgotten. His police senses were tingling.

"Babs, why do you even want to know? Is there something you want to tell me?"

She startled, a fake smile planting itself on her face with an almost audible _thunk_. "No, no, just curious is all. Anyway, I'm _sure_ Batman will take care of things!"

He continued staring at her. "Yes. He almost always does." He saw her shivering at the _almost _rejoinder. What was she hiding from him?

* * *

With all the goodwill in the world, Batman was just one guy. Jim knew this better than anyone else, having been on the receiving end of the little details the Bat left behind for most of the past ten years. Taking down crime rings, pinpointing murderers, knocking down supervillains, they all took time, a lot of time, far more time than any one person actually had. The mayor understood that.

By now, the Bat had adopted a routine; stake out targets for five days a week, then take them out in the remaining two days of the week, spend an indeterminate amount of time recovering from any wounds you may accumulate over those two days. Still, Batman did forward all the evidence and data he'd uncovered to Jim's unit, who then used this to target the worst Batman couldn't and find sources to help build a case against the scum the Bat brought in sometimes. Which the district attorney appreciated, but he also tended to look down upon any Batman-influenced case which landed on his desk, much to everyone else's frustration. Which was why the mayor reckoned putting the ass in the hot seat of the police precinct made for a perfect revenge. Especially today.

Today was day two of five of the stake-out routine and things were busy in the crime-fighting world. For some reason, the criminal underground had become increasingly active over the past year and a half, which meant a lot of churning in The Bowels and a fair amount of scum to catch. Now the underground was going into overdrive, with more than a dozen gangs infiltrating the old Mafiosi territories and sparking up turf wars with what was left of Gotham's native criminal elements. Throw Joker into the mix...

Needless to say, the entire precinct moved like someone had just kicked the anthill over and was pouring napalm straight into the Queen's chambers. It was chaotic, frantic and the mayor was pretty sure that at least one office he passed was on fire, but it was somebody else's problem today. No, today his chief of police had a very special meeting to attend. And there was nothing Gordon could do to avoid it, no matter how much he'd tried to beg off for 'just one more day'. The mayor smiled. Whatever happened, Jim remained steadfastly Jim. The mayor sighed as yet _another_ row descended into unrestrained shouting. It was the fifth one that morning, and mayor Littleby had had enough waiting on his DA whilst sipping what the desk sergeant laughingly referred to as coffee. Let that bastard of a public prosecutor handle things for once. He was off to have a nice stiff drink before meeting with that pretty boy Wayne.

* * *

Elsewhere, another public official was having not-so-kind thoughts toward his fellow man too.

The office was typical for those of its type: sterile, featuring white walls with framed motivation posters dangling at geometrically precise intervals between each other, a flurry of artificial plants trying to detract attention from that one dead cactus hiding behind a coffee mug, glass window looking out on one of the more sanitary parts of the city and a glass front door giving the guy sitting behind the standard-issue office desk with beige computer and bland office accessories attached to it a perfect view of a row of grey cubicles that, taking all the decorations inside them into account, looked like a float Sirius had once seen at the Gotham Gay Pride Parade.

The person sitting behind the desk was no office worker. No, Sirius's police side told him, this man was a bureaucrat through and through. He radiated precision, poise and reservation like one of the pureblooded princesses he'd grown up around, but dressed like he was a car salesman. Then again, he did not work for the private sector and advertising your capabilities too openly was something even Jim's bosses frowned upon. The glasses, wireframe yet still somehow chunky enough to hide the sharp eyes lurking behind them, were a nice touch too.

Now, what was a high-level government paper pusher was doing in an office this far away from either Washington or Boston, if that bulge in the man's suit jacket held a wand instead of one of those fancy new tasers? It was something Sirius was dreading to find out.

"James Gordon." The man behind the desk stated as he looked up at Sirius. "My name's Michael Teller. Please, take a seat." Jim sat down, clearly not used to how uncomfortable the plastic chair was turning out to be. He shuffled and shifted a bit, adjusting himself to the hard plastic seat that felt like it was trying to crawl up his bum. Maybe he could get some of these chairs for interrogation sessions? No wait, the guys over at the DA's office would pitch a fit if some smart-ass lawyer managed to get these chairs classed as psychological torture devices which, Sirius was willing to admit, would be dead easy if his ass had anything to say about it.

Mike pulled a manila folder from one of the compartments on his desk. He undid the string holding the folder together and flicked the cover off. "Now let's see-ah!" Mike exclaimed, pulling out a nondescript piece of paper out of the folder. "If you would please sign here, here and here sir." he flicked the paper over to Gordon, the areas highlighted by a red X on the side of each section.

Gordon looked down on the piece of paper, reading through the page even as he made himself look unfocused and impatient. It still made no sense to him; it read like a standard non-disclosure agreement, but the page's borders were lined with elaborate engravings which, if he wasn't mistaken, carried runes buried underneath the stylish tracings of vines running along the edges of the contract and sometimes drifting... into...

He breathed out a surprised "ahh" as he realised what he was looking at. The relevant sentences all had what looked like a stray tendril from the artwork brushing up against them. To a non-magical, such a thing would appear innocuous enough to evade detection, a strange design flaw in the printing process perhaps, but nothing more. To Sirius Black, scion of a family that specialised in researching and dissecting the darker sides of magic, this meant that the artwork acted as a kind of circuit linking the runes hidden underneath with the sentence it is linked to.

Whatever this agreement covered was important enough to make doubly sure that the non-disclosure agreement was enforced with vows of silence that could, if the correct runes were used, extend well beyond the grave. Even in death, neither Sirius nor anyone listening into the coming conversation would be able to talk about anything that happened during the meeting unless specifically told otherwise. He felt the icy touch of pallour overtaking the Gotham Tan he'd developed over the years and tried to stifle it before mister Teller cottoned onto his horror.

The vicious-looking smile he was given not a second later told him he'd failed, but that he'd still passed a test... of sorts.

"And why would you want me to sign something like... this, mister Teller?"

"Come on now Lord Black, surely you can understand just _why_ such a question cannot be answered?" The smile had vanished back into the studied blandness of a bureaucrat that was up to something. "You won't be able to talk about this to anyone else, but you will be otherwise free to do what you wish with the information afterwards."

_Lord Black... British Government? One way to find out._ "Alright." Gordon said, taking a pen out of a pocket and signing his name in three different places. A slight tickle at the base of his skull indicated that the magic had settled... and that it incorporated a killswitch. He shuddered. "Now mister Teller, what could possibly be important enough for you to endanger the life of a Gotham City government official?"

The man, if he even was a man, settled into his seat. "Put simply, Lord Black, the boy who lived is coming here to open the first British Wizarding Embassy on American soil since the Secession. We want you to help us in this endeavour."

"Really?" Jim exclaimed. This was not what he'd expected. "And what can I do, then? I've got my own job to worry about, you know?"

"Well, you can get us in touch with the Gotham Magical Police Department." The man said, smiling politely in that 'are-you-stupid' way anyone living with Slytherins learned to recognise and endure... until the prank supplies arrived, at least.

Sirius snorted, his Jim side coming to the fore as he went over the various law enforcement agencies operating in Gotham in his head "But there _is_ no magical police department. Hasn't been one since the seventies. It's why I came here in the first place, as you well know."Michael just inhaled in surprise before he started laughing.

"_You don't know." _he stated after managing to get his laugh down to a coughing fit.

"Oh hell..." _sigh_ "Mister Gordon, Sirius Black, whatever, look... This may be rather difficult for you to understand, but the Gotham City Magical Police Department, small and poor as it may be, _does_ exist and has a rather good track record when it comes to making arrests. They even have a cadetship program going, or at least that's the excuse they use to justify employing and training teenagers over the summer holidays. And between you, me and the doorknobs, there's one cadet who's shown a lot of promise since starting the program a couple of years ago."

He fished out another blank-faced folder out of the impossibly messy pile, handing it over to him. "so much so that _she's_ going to be the liaison between the magical and mundane police forces and the Brits' own security detachment." The file was a service jacket. The title_ Barbara Anne Gordon (nee Potter) – Deputy Special Agent- Senior Grade_ was printed on top.

Gordon just shook his head. No way. "What the flying fuck... I need a drink." _This can't be happening._

_Thunk_. A small bottle of something both yellow and evil appeared on Mike's desk as if by magic. Two shotglasses, expertly conjured by the cobra in a sloth suit, were rapidly filled with a strange and sharp-smelling liquid. Both men lifted a glass, tossed its contents down their throat and set the empty containers back down on the desk with another _thump_.

Visibly relaxing himself, Jim forced his eyes to drift away from the proof of the fact that his daughter had been lying to his face _for years_ and back to the man who'd just told him that she was going to probably make a career out of it. "Alright, I want two things out of you. First, I want her full file ASAP."

Mister Teller nodded, rummaged through his odd collection of papers and came up with a larger lever-arch folder. "And the second would be a drink."

''You seem well informed, Mister Teller. Yes, that was going to be my second request." _My third would be for you to kindly piss off, but seeing as I am sitting in your office..._

Though he didn't move, Teller seemed to understand just what the policeman was thinking. Not that it made him _do_ anything to follow up on that. "Lord Black, I can assure you that that file is rather long. Wouldn't it be best if you were to have a cup of tea or coffee instead?"

"Wait, why is a deputy's file that large?" Sirius asked as he mentally tallied the number of pages he'd be sifting through as he listened to the other man talk.

"May I suggest you look at her current position in the MPD _in lieu_ of answering?"

Jim turned back to her careers page. "Bloody buggering shite."

"Hah! I knew it. The same reaction I had. Now, as you are reading this, would you mind dearly if I occasionally took some of your time to brief you on what will be happening in the next few weeks? My, ah, _superiors,_" Teller said with a frown of distaste "really want your cooperation in these matters as well as your adoptive daughters'. So, the first batch of officials will be arriving in the next two weeks-

As Gordon half-listened to the man prattling along about arrival schedules and public tours, Jim continued to stare at the file, flicking through pages at random and trying to make sense of it all. Just how the hell did his 18-year-old daughter become a blooming squad commander behind his back?

* * *

_I should not have gotten out of bed today._

That was Barbara's first thought as she dressed for the day. It had started with her alarm clock informing her that day 2 of her post-18th life would start with rain and a slight chance of snow. In the middle of July. Only in Gotham...

Then, there was her dear, sweet dad. Dear, sweet Dad who happens to be the sharpest cop in Gotham. During her school days, it was mildly annoying. He always seemed to know what guys caught her eye, what classes she needed to work on and what magical tutors she was giving a hard time without anyone seemingly telling him. But hey, she didn't really care all that much. It was funny and kinda sweet most of the time, and it's not like being grounded really mattered when you had a time turner handy.

Over the summer, however, that ability to _know _what she was doing left her terrified about him discovering her little secret.

She'd found out about the MPD shortly after Tracy's disappearance on her 14th birthday. She'd been looking for something more than just the cops to turn to and stumbled across what, at first glance, looked like a federal agency's law office. What she'd found was something completely different.

Turned out that the office was actually a full-on building disguised as a shop-front to any non-magical, located on the shared entrance to both Gotham alley and Suicide Alley. Said building had, a bare twenty years ago, been the headquarters for a hundred-strong police force.

When she found it, it was a bunch of down-on-their luck MLE personnel assigned to Gotham to keep a look out for any local breaches in the magical statute that could not be covered by the superhero excuse. Them, and a bunch of teenagers, including orphans from magical orphanages across the country that used Gotham as a dumping ground for unwanted kids, operated what could, after a couple of hits from whatever the commander was smoking, be confused for an actual Law Enforcement outfit.

The officers lounged around and collected reports while the teenagers and orphans did the leg work in exchange for whatever resources the station had to spare. She joined their ranks as a part-time trainee deputy a week later, more as a distraction from Tracy than any sense of duty towards a magical ghost town.

And now she was starting her fourth year at the rank of deputy squad leader. And she was still scared shitless that her father would find out. She snorted to herself. If he hadn't figured out what was going on by now, chances were that he wouldn't figure it out until he showed her what her summer job looked like. Not like it'd change anything. She'd volunteered for six months' worth of work. She had never taken another vow, meaning that she had the option of walking away whenever it pleased her to do so. She could. Really, she could. It was a matter of choice, really.

And now, she'd found the final nail in the coffin for the idea of it being a pleasant day; her badge started glowing the light orange that signalled a general call-in. Something big was up. She sighed, looking out at the rain-swept streets from her bedroom window, the soft colours and collection of nostalgic girly-era plush toys clashing rather violently with her work suit, black leather gloves, baseball cap and trench coat. She picked up her briefcase with the left hand & her badge with the right one and smiled at an imaginary audience.

"Activate."

* * *

A magical police department operating in what was officially classified as a magical ghost town was different in nature to a normal one operating next to a major wizarding settlement. Whereas a police precinct can be rather hectic and filled with people at the oddest times, the MPD had little in the way of a magical population to protect and serve. Their primary issue was not to keep the peace on the streets of Gotham, but to keep a lookout for any threats to magical society as a whole that could pop up. And, given that this ghost town was the unofficial residence of literally thousands of magical criminal, there were a whole lot of threats to keep track of and frustratingly little in terms of real authority to go around.

In Britain, this would be a very serious challenge indeed, dangerous even with the number of possible leaks phone cameras have come to represent . In America, home to the superheroes and supervillains of the world, such a duty was similar to making sure nobody tried to steal Alcatraz. True, that was an unfair comparison since a couple of California-based villains had actually _succeeded_ in doing just that not so long ago, but the spirit is still there in the statement; this was a dead-end job.

The MPD had become the dumping ground of the MLE divisions operating across America. The Massachusets Mounties, the Nevada task force, the Detroit enforcers, la policia mexicana asistente, the New York Aurors... all the law enforcement agencies from all the small countries operating within mundane US border limits and beyond sent an observer to Gotham. Just one. As a result, a force of 25 MLE officers were expected to police a city of 2-3 million people. And because of the poor image the job carried, only those starting their careers or stuck doing dead-end jobs chose to go there.

Gotham MPD was, like every morning, eerily quiet. The MLE officers were busy working through whatever magical crimes they were to investigate, most of the 'cadets' or, as they were more accurately known, the orphans, were probably already off to do their daily 6-hour surveillance shift and Barbara & the dozen deputies working there over the summer for some pocket money, training, magical restrictions exemption, job experience and/or to complete whatever community service sentence they had to serve hadn't reported in yet.

The portkey badge deposited Barbara in the arrivals lobby. Where she promptly landed on her ass as she took in the depressingly familiar room. The plastic chairs bolted onto the white-washed walls were empty, a styrofoam cup and week-old newspaper sitting on one of them being the only signs that occupation was not completely unheard of. The harsh glare of a permanent lumos enchantment bathed the scene in ethereal white, with the only indication of the passage of time coming from a clock hung up near the exit door. As with most of the first floor of the building, there were no windows looking out onto the outside world, not that that was a great loss mind. When your choices range from crime central to a setting for cheesy post-apocalyptic films, you learn to cope with the loss.

Barbara snorted to herself, getting up off the marble-tiled floor to head off to find someone to talk to about this emergency. She really, really should have stayed in bed that morning.

* * *

A/N: did you enjoy it? Hope you did. Stuff happens in the next chapter, and maybe some of the hogwarts peeps show up, but that's not sure yet.

Annotations:

_This is an excerpt of a discussion I had with Kwan Li about magical America_:

America is a young country. Settlers only really started to turn things around in the eighteen hundreds. There have been countless waves of immigrants over the past two centuries. The USA has only been unified relatively recently.

To us, four centuries is a long time. To a wizard, that could potentially be a mere four, maybe even three generations away. To wit, a mage living today may have had a grandfather coming over on the Mayflower if wizards remain fertile past the hundred year mark which, thanks to (or because of) magic, they probably do.

The unified country we all know and love is more than likely not to be as unified on the wizarding side of things.

If a large wave of immigrants left the magical world in Europe, they would have encountered the shamans and spiritual guides of the Indians. Now these guys were scary enough to the Americans that they tried to wipe out the various tribes in the normal world. The magical Indians would have been the ones that fended off the Aztec mages, the very same that could massacre thousands of people a year without any fuss if they said it appeased some god or another. Not only that, but a European wizard is likely to have never come across the kinds of magical techniques the indians practiced. Hell, the expecto patronum spell may well have had its roots in the spirit guides shtick in the first place.

Then there were the earlier settlers, wizards that set up their own society far from the established enclaves and hung onto them with grim determination even as the normal world's America steadily united under one banner. Oh, and the confederacy mess? Likely to have caused yet another split between the official Magical America and its southern regions. And given how long-lived and capable of operating with little to nothing in the way of infrastructure support and assorted tools your average wizard would have been back then, their bid for independent governance would have been successful for a very long time. A unified magical government is less than likely given these circumstances.

In all honesty, Hp verse magical America is a scary place. Change is slow to percolate into England and often goes in the wrong direction by condoning things many would find despicable. In magical America, it is likely to be even worse given how fractured the history we know of already is. Magical America may be nothing more than a post box in DC given how badly screwed up America could be under these circumstances. Not to mention the wars the magicals would be fighting to keep what little ground they've managed to acquire out of the arms of whoever the enemy happened to be for the day.

It took Britain a long time to settle into a unified governing body and it is backed by the royal family to boot. Magical America is new, full of new settlers and home to the most screwed up politics ever. The support base needed to establish a coherent magical society is still being built as it takes a while for wizards to adapt even with the simple things. The whole continent is a mess of small enclaves and large armies, not a happy combination. And if American fiction is anything to go by, it's a perilous land fraught with danger and crawling with the nightmares only ever glimpsed elsewhere. A fractured country with lots of problems and few solutions. Voldemort would have been greeted with relief. Finally, a problem straightforward enough for them to solve.

What you're reading here is the outline of what my vision of Magical America is; fragile, newborn, constantly teetering on the brink and plagued with frightening problems. Perfect environment for introducing superheroes in a credible fashion and giving your characters both cool stuff and powerful enemies to fight.

* * *

_Damn I'm good! Use this at your leisure; I'm sure that I will. Oh, and anyone wanting to draw up a map of what magical America would look like, feel free to drop me a link. I'll be sure to feature and credit you for it. And you get a cameo if you want one. And remember, Kwan Li, The Mad Mad Reviewer, Darth Marrs, Swimdraconian, Crowlows19 and a HUGE bunch of others do awesome AU HP universes. If that is your thing, read some of their stuff. If it isn't read some anyway, you may be pleasantly surprised._

PS: about the ratings thing, chill the hell out. True, the peeps that run this site now may have just slightly shot themselves in the foot on this one, but there are plenty of other fanfic sites out there nowadays, far more than there were two years ago. Delete or not, it's no skin off your nose, just repost your stories elsewhere and, if you _really _must, come back and repost it once they grow a brain and add things like age-locked ratings & other age-verification techniques of similar ilk. They have a website to run and it seems that their servers are hosted in a rather litigious part of the world, so don't begrudge them too much. Standards adherence is their job, after all.


	3. Office presentations

**A/N: Uh yeah, so this one kinda ran away from me as I was writing it. Hope you enjoy it though. Lotsa talking, setting the scene etc. Action, well, not yet, but soon. Soon, yes, soon. And remember, the Mad Mad Reviewer and Luan Mao deserve your undying love & affection for their brilliance. Enjoy!**

* * *

The office looked like something out of a steampunk comic.

Large brass pipes were bolted into the ceiling, reminders of a distant past where the Gotham MPF had been the world leaders in law enforcement communications systems. The desks were solid timber, some dating back to the early days where Gotham village first played host to a magical sheriff, others bought at auction from down-on-their-luck bankers when the roaring twenties turned into the fucked-up thirties. The chairs were an odd mixture of leather-upholstered antiques that looked like they came from a museum and standard office chairs you could find in any cubicle farm in the world.

Difference engines shared wallspace with massive rack servers and filing cabinets, the steady _clack-clack-clack_ of computational gears shifting around inside the brass and wood cupboards serving as a counterpoint to the dry hum of the fans that kept the MPF's mainframe servers from melting into a toxic puddle on the floor. Runic wardstones sat next to laptops, desktops and ledgers over an inch thick.

Manilla folders were sorted in thick wooden binders. Plastic trays marked 'in' and 'out' overflowed with parchment and standard A4 printouts. Memos made out of vellum paper were pinned to the cork board labelled 'minor infractions', mentions of possible magic use in the various crimes committed around the city written with painstaking precision using both quills and ballpoint pens.

Communications mirrors and office phones lay buried underneath stray paperwork. Wizarding photos waved at random passers-by and scowled at the mundane, immobile ones they shared space with. Potted plants snapped at you if you looked at them funny. The wooden floorboards that you could see in old photos taken of the station had been concreted over before the floor was covered with carpets that had last seen a decent clean when the District's house elf died in the seventies.

The portraits of officers dead & gone in the line of duty were listening to the Gotham police's official and less-than-official radio communications bands and watching a hacked stream of Wayne boulevard's CCTV footage, checking to see if the latest bank robbers were using magic to get out of the siege their little venture into crime had degenerated into. A dwarf and a goblin were arguing the relative merits of C4 vs Thermite for opening vault doors over a cup of coffee.

And then there was the band of people who worked here. It was strange what a force of 25 full-time aurors and close to a hundred volunteers could come up with when told to, quote, 'dress appropriately you fucking idiots', unquote.

You could tell the aurors by their red robes-most of the time. Dad had taken her to see a production of Joseph and the amazing technicolour dreamcoat back when she was a kid. From what one of the Aurors from Missouri was wearing, Barbara wondered if that coat hadn't been a prop. There was a man dressed just like Willy Wonka. The guy on loan from Arkansas was wearing a world war 2 British pilot's uniform with a blue overcoat. It looked new. She vowed to herself never to set foot in Little Rock if she could help it. Though the fact that their government was an absolute monarchy kinda sealed that deal long ago. Feudalism just _wasn't_ _her_.

Then there were the kids. Most of the volunteers spent one month in Salem followed by two weeks working in Gotham. Depending on how much they liked normal America, some then chose to home-school in Gotham indefinitely and enter the normal education system. Sure, it took longer, which meant that you were subject to the gentle ministrations of the Gotham MPF's volunteer program for longer, but you actually got what amounted to a well-rounded education and college money out of it. The end result could be seen in the kids' clothes. From Babs's point of view, there was a 70/30 split between those who wanted to stay in the magical world (30 percent) and those who wanted to try and live in the normal one instead (70 percent).

This was reflected in their styles of clothing – there were ten kids still in their Salem uniforms, having just gotten back by Portkey that morning, who were ambling around and grumbling about spending yet another fortnight doing the legwork because their lazy nominal supervisors had so much trouble getting out of their comfy leather armchairs in order to patrol the ghost town they called home. Another twenty lounged around in either the robes or dandy outfits that included a top hat and enchanted monocles officially recommended as 'casual uniforms' in the MPF's auror field operations manual (written by Maj. A.E. Pessimal in 1876, current edition re-printed ca. 1920 in a magical press in Derbyshire, of all places).

The other seventy-odd teenagers were dressed in 'mugglewear'-jeans, shirt and/or t-shirt with a heavy jacket and sturdy shoes were the norm. These were the kids Barbara liked the best. Not that she played favourites, mind, it's just that she related to them better than she related to the kids that thought that magic was the be-all and end-all of their lives. They followed non-magical fashion, watched TV, went to the movies, played video games, read books, basically kept in touch with the normal world with a fervency similar to her own. Oh, they still spent most of their time in the magical world, but they were planning on doing other things as well, like, say, going to college or travelling the world before or instead of settling down and having magical babies like the wizarding world seemed to expect them to do straight away.

Apparently, if Dad hadn't taken her to Gotham all those years ago, then that was exactly what she would have been expected to do too. In fact, if what Dad said was true, then she could have been forced to do so if she hadn't co-operated. She still hadn't thanked him this week for doing that. Maybe she should. Ah, well, that could wait. She had work to do after all.

* * *

She descended the steps that led from main office down into the ops section, waving at the few aurors who weren't either too drunk or sleep-deprived to ignore her. Some waved back before turning to the gigantic interactive map of Gotham to study whatever magical crime had landed on their desks this morning.

Her current team smiled and waved at her, the five of them standing in a loose semi-circle around a desk. Heidi, 16, currently still in her Salem uniform. Macca, 12, looking like he'd just gotten out of his bed in the upstairs dorms. Runcible (_Call me ron, please_), 17, wearing a t-shirt, leather pants and moccasins for some reason. Loki, 15, clad in what looked like a standard Gotham Police uniform as he usually was. And Claude. Wearing a cocktail party dress. A _red_ cocktail party dress. It really didn't suit him. Babs raised an eyebrow at him. He raised one back, looked down, then raised both, blushed and reverted back to her base form. Dad had told her a bit about Metamorphmagi and, while Claude's training was very patchy and time-consuming, Barbara had found that having one on your team was a great asset even if the whole accidental change thing got annoying at times.

"So what's up, guys?" Barbara asked.

"Got an emergency badge call this morning." Macca said grumpily. "Still don't know why."

"Same here." Heidi confirmed. "Got it just as I arrived in the alley's portkey terminal. The other Salem kids did too."

"Really? All of 'em?" Loki whistled. "Sounds like big gun time."

"Yeah, the other Salemites phoned in asking what was going on. Apparently, those still at the magical academy are being briefed at the same time we are." Heidi said. "Jeevis is pissed about it. He was due to take his OWLs this morning."

Ron just nodded. "Got a call-in while I was scoping the docks. Maybe something to do with the Joker again? He was snoopin' around here last time he broke out."

"Nah." Claude said. "This's got piss-all to do with that guy. And what's this about a briefing, anyway?"

"Hammerchuck said something 'bout that. The Goblin Nation is going nuts in New York. He thinks it may have something to do with that." Macca piped in. "Though Gurg'Nash disagreed. His Keep-brothers in England said something about the war being over in the British magical enclave. He bet it had something to do with that."

"Hmmm." Barbara frowned. "The war's over over there? When did that happen?"

"Last month." Heidi said. "God, don't you _read_ your current events briefings?"

"No." Barbara said. "I catch bad guys. _You_ read my current events briefings and tell me what's up."

"That's unfair, you know." Loki said with a half-smile. "Burying us in newspapers while you hare off and do your thing."

Babs shrugged. "Me, reckless crim-snatcher. You, support team. Haven't we been over this already?" She smiled at them. "So, war. Spill."

Heidi cleared her throat. "Two years ago, terrorists calling themselves the Knights of Walpurgis but commonly known as Death Eaters seized the Ministry of Magic in Wizarding Britain, resulting in a blanket travel ban by magical means to and from the UK."

"Okay, with you so far. That's roughly when we busted the human trafficking ring preying on British magical refugees, right?" Barbara asked, remembering the slavers and the kids they were selling. She shuddered. That could have been her they'd pulled out of the Pleasure Camp if things had gone differently.

"Right. Anyway, last may, the Dark Lord leading the terrorists decided to go all-out and attack the last independent magical stronghold in the British Isles. This resulted in what has been called the Battle of Hogwarts."

"Wait, Hogwarts? What kind of name is that?" Claude asked, slightly confused about the whole thing. "Did they have the battle on a farm or something?"

"Hogwarts is the local magical school. It's basically a big castle designed by MC Escher." Babs told her.

"Yeah, and how did you know that? It's not exactly common knowledge." Heidi asked.

"Some of my tutors went to school there."

"Interesting. Anyway, so the Battle took place last May. There were about two hundred dead and three hundred wounded. Most of the dead were school kids, most of the wounded were the aforementioned terrorists. However, the Dark Lord called Voldemort _was_ among the dead."

Ron snorted. "Voldemort. What a crap name to give a kid."

Heidi just looked at him. "He chose it himself."

"Still a crap name."

"So, Dark Lord dead. Killed by a guy who's all of eighteen. Terrorists up & lost their collective shit and decided to go out in a blaze of fire, which accounted for another two-three hundred dead. Magical Britain re-established communications shortly thereafter. The end." Heidi said, exasperated by the interruptions.

Barbara smiled. "Now that's a good fairy tale. Bad guys dead. Boy Hero won the day. All is well?"

"Uh, not quite." Heidi told her. "Most of the people that died that day were the current or potential heads of the magical version of their House of Lords. Couple that with the fact that the rescue teams sent to help clean up the mess found out what happened to most of the 'muggleborn', as they called them and it's looking pretty bad back in the old country right now."

"So, what happened to the 'muggleborn' then?" Loki asked.

"Concentration camp."

"Oh." Runcible said, paling.

"Complete with gas chambers and everything."

"Ah."

"About ten thousand vics, if the stats they published are right."

"Holy shit." Barbara said in awed horror. Ten thousand dead accounted for about half the known magical population of the UK if the numbers published about five years ago had been right.

"Yeah. Not so much fun. Most of the survivors of the war up and left after that, too. By the current estimate, there's a little more than a thousand wizards & witches active in Britain now."

"Fuck me." Macca said.

"Oi, language, you!" Claude said.

"Oh yeah, right little Miss-ter hypocrite, sure I'll listen to you on that one." Macca snapped at the metamorph.

"Can it." Barbara said in her command voice. "Back to the main subject here; we don't know what this briefing's about, but whatever it is requires all hands on deck and the scuttlebutt as reported by macca pins it as either a potential Goblin crisis or something to do with wizarding Britain which, as Heidi has just told us, just underwent near-total genocide at the hands of an insane ass-hole of a Dark Lord. Right so far?" The group nodded. "Okay, so this is what you guys are gonna do. Macca, go pester Hammer and Gurg for more info please. Loki, you're on internet duty. Go surf those hidden magical websites and see if you can find out about anything happening out there. Heidi, hit up Miss Carter for any info on the purely magical side of things."

"Babs, she's the headmistress, not a news outlet." Heidi said coolly.

"Well, find _someone_ well-informed to pump for information then." Babs snapped at her before clearing her throat. Runcible-"

"Ron"

"Alright, _Ron_, go lurk around and see if anyone that may be connected to this whole thing has arrived in town recently. Claude, you're the joined-up thinker on this one. Collect their reports and figure out what's going on."

"Uh, why me?"

"Because, last time, Macca did it. Now it's your turn. Hop to it!"

"Yes'm!" Claude hurried over to Barbara's desk.

Barbara stared at the others. "And what are you all hanging around for, huh?"

"Well," Heidi fidgeted. "We were kinda wondering what you were going to do."

"Me?" They nodded. "I'm off to get briefed. See y'all later kiddies."

* * *

The seat was a cold plastic fold-up chair. The coffee had run cold long before Barbara arrived. The room was a dim cube of concrete with a projector near the entrance and a large canvas screen on the other side. A plastic foldable desk sat on the left side of the screen, a laptop being the only thing sitting on it. Its battery light blinked lazily as it recharged. Greyish-white paint covered the walls in a single coating, the slabs of concrete that had gone into making this room back in the fifties visible through the chipped coating. The floor was covered in dark blue carpets that drank up the light of the single _lumos_-enhanced lightbulb that illuminated the room with greedy abandon. Fifty people sat or milled around in silence, the occasional whispered 'hello' and 'what are you even doing in here? Go back to work.' Ringing loudly around the cavernous monstrosity that had been one of Gotham MPF's last expansion efforts before the slump.

Barbara drank the cold coffee with a grimace. This was the kind of swill that gave her fond memories of the police lobby-quality coffee she would sneak in while waiting for Dad to come off work when she was little. It didn't even have the excuse of being instant coffee either-it was just cheap, magical and now cold. She closed her eyes, focusing a bit of her mind on the concept of _warmth, heat, infusion_ and applying it to the contents inside the cup. There. Not much better, but at least drinking this shit was more bearable now. She saw some of the others take out their wands and do the same. Hah. Weaklings.

It looked like things were about to start too. The last of the deputies settled into their hard plastic chairs with a frown, some still groggy from waking up and others nodding off after a long night's work. The Aurors filed in, went straight to the front and slumped into their seats. They always took those seats. Good for them. No amount of money in the world would convince Barbara Gordon to sit there during a crisis meeting like this. No matter what the crisis turned out to be, being right in the face of Captain Andrews for the duration of the presentation when he was likely in one of his 'moods' was not exactly a healthy occupation.

Finally, the man of the hour arrived. He looked like he hadn't had a lot of sleep lately, but that was normal. He was dressed in the dark blue dress uniform that marked him out as a Captain of the Gotham Magical Police Force, medals and all. Unfortunately, he had attained that rank by virtue of not being fired like the rest of the Force had been in the sixties when the bottom dropped out of the magical manufacturing industry and ninety-odd percent of magical residents decided to up and leave for greener pastures. He'd still been there when the Gotham City Magical District Council shut down, when the final shopfront closed on Shopping Alley, when the local magical school relocated to Wisconsin and when Gotham City was legally disbanded as an independent magical nation and placed under the general purview of the ICW. He was admired for his puzzling ability to not get fired, if anything. But even fourty years of loyal and able service had not been enough to erase the stigma of having made captain not because of your ability but simply because there was nobody else _left._

Captain Andrews, aka Robert 'Bob' Andrews to the Gotham Police Force (drunk driving, not the best way to meet your non-magical colleagues) stood there in his uniform, thin, haggard-looking and sporting bags under his eyes a St Bernard would have considered sexy. Smiling. Well, that was new.

"Ladies and Gentlemen." He started before clearing his throat and fiddling with the laptop. "Bloody thing, work damn you. Stevens?" He asked one of the Aurors in the front. "Some help please?"

Stevens, looking for all the world like Nikola Tesla in his Victorian Gentleman's outfit, got up and started the program. The projector whirred to life as a slideshow came up.

"I've called this meeting today to do two things: first, to congratulate you on the hard work you've done this year. I know it's been a hard couple of years for all of you, what with the rising levels of magical crime and the deaf ears upon which our demands for better pay & facilities upgrades have fallen, but all of those in this room and watching us today from their stations have done and outstanding job in rising to the challenge. Well done, all of you." He said, clapping as he said so. Nobody joined in. Andrews cleared his throat again. "Anyway, the second thing we're going to be talking about is a matter of some importance-to all of us."

"As you all know, the Dark Lord Voldemort was defeated on May the 25th this year. Now, while this is a cause for celebration, the reality is that things haven't really been all that great for wizarding Britain. The few reports that have come back to us don't paint too good a picture for our brothers across the pond. It can be summarised like this: Magical Britain is gone. Finished. Its population is no longer at sustainable levels, its infrastructure is destroyed and, well, the few people who knew how it worked in the first place are dead, its government is about as lively as an inferius and, well, you get the picture, right?" Everyone nodded. Barbara praised Heidi in her head as she nodded along. This would have been a nasty shock if she hadn't heard of anything before this. Did Dad know? Should she tell him? Maybe not now. Wait until he was off work, maybe. Vacation time was coming up for him anyway, maybe he'll take it this time? If she told him, would he?

"But, there is some good news for them. The ICW, in their never-ending wisdom, have decreed that volunteers would be called for repopulating Wizarding Britain. They'd be given money, jobs and, as an added bonus, should they prove to be skilled enough to warrant it, one of the vacant titles. That's the real draw here: Becoming head of house Malfoy, Nott, Potter, Black-the names of almost all the greats are up for grabs!" He grinned. Barbara was impressed despite herself. An actual title to a magical lordship? Damn, now there's a draw! If it wasn't for college and work, she probably would go for it herself. Barbara Potter. Had a nice ring to it. Dad really liked talking about them too.

Andrews broke through the murmus. "Anyhow. There is one problem, pretty big one too. The remaining members of government have decreed that only people with backgrounds from English-speaking countries could apply for supported migration. No French, no Germans, no Scandinavians, Russians etcetera. Which means that, apart from Ireland, there's very little in the way of European-based migrants looking to cash in. Which is a problem for them, but good for us. Why for us? Because the Brits have decided to re-open their American embassy."

"Which just happens to have been based in Gotham." The murmurs started getting louder.

"WHICH MEANS!" the murmurs stopped. "We've got a job to do. Not only is the British delegation on its way, we're also expecting a huge influx of wannabe migrants. AND this announcement means that all those magical refugees living in muggle Gotham are going to come crawling out of the woodwork too..." He trailed off as he looked at their faces.

"Make no mistake, this is going to be a gold rush. We're getting a lot of magical people &creatures looking to start a new life here already thanks to the legal grey area Gotham became in the seventies. They don't like us, they don't talk to us, hell, half the time we don't even find out they're here until some dumbass waves a wand around on Youtube. Some of the guys looking to start a new life over there won't be fun to deal with either. We're talking runaways, outlaws, career criminals, the very scum of the earth looking to make an escape from the law here. _They_ sure as hell won't be walking through the front door and declaring their intentions, let me tell you. In fact, you can bank on the fact that they're going to be starting _something_ while they're here-one last score to settle, one last time, one last hurrah, I'm sure you get the drift. It's gonna be your job to find them and bring them in, got it? Good."

He took out a wand and waved it. A file appeared on Barbara's lap. "These are your assignments. As of now, all leave is cancelled. All of our volunteers are recalled from Salem and will be despatched as soon as Desdemone Carter has found them. If you want to take a day off, forget it. If you call in sick, I want a doctor's or mediwizard's certificate on my desk the next day. I don't give a shit if your grandma died. Inferius her, shoot her through the head and hold a ceremony some other time for all I care. Your normal duty roster is suspended. Patrols are to include _all_ of Gotham from now on." _Oh fuck. _"You are also, under ICW regulations 12-26, now allowed to use lethal force in the apprehension of criminals as long as you can prove the perp committed the crime in the first place. We're going to be receiving new aurors in the coming weeks to supplement our current contingent. You are to welcome them as politely as you can possibly manage. I don't want to mediate a pissing contest here, guys. You may be senior Aurors, but I'll still slam your lazy butts down to journeyman LEOs if you start some shit, got it? Welcome them into the fold, feed them cookies, make them coffee and change their diapers if you have to, but _don't_ fuck with them. If you fuck with them, you're fucking with me. Got that? Right, dismissed."

* * *

Barbara got up with the other deputies, clutching her file with trepidation. She wondered what her assignment would be."Gordon." The Captain called, pointing at her and making a 'c'mere' gesture. She stiffened, nodded and made her way back down the aisle of folding chairs.

The Captain looked straight at her eyes. "So then, how is my favourite deputy?"

"Alright Sir."

"Are you? That's not what a little bird told me just before I got to make this delightful presentation."

"Captain?"

"I'll level with you Gordon." He said in a gruff whisper. "This whole thing is a clusterfuck in the making. What we're going to do is try and keep people from getting killed, capische? As far as I'm concerned, when this shit goes down, if we don't end up with a murder vic a day I'll be dancing a fucking jig." She nodded.

" So there I was, writing up the assignments this fine morn, when your name comes up. And I ask myself 'well golly gee, miss holly, where other than at the MPF have I heard that name before? Oh right, Jim Gordon, the guy that signed my DUI! I wonder if they are related?' Lo and behold, a quick file check later, I found out you were! Why, what an _amazing_ coincidence, what with me needing a police force liaison officer and all! And with your Dad being the police chief of Gotham City, no less! Why, wasn't I blessed-_this morning_?" Barbara found her panic setting in.

"Uh-uh-u..."

"_Not a word_." Andrews growled. "So I send one of the goons from the ICW to go brief your father about how his darling little angel, one of my best deputies _ever_, will have the _singular_ honor of helping steer Gotham City through this most difficult of times, and guess what I find out? _That he didn't fucking know! About any of it_!" Barbara opened her mouth. Closed it. What was there to say?

"This is too big an event for me to just up and put an unknown in the position of liaison officer. So you are going there, you will say hi to Daddy, sit him down and you will _tell him_ everything. You will tell him how his darling little angel took down The Sorceress by braining her with an assault shotgun. You will tell him of how his little Princess spent fifteen days staking out Mickey the Pimp and took him down by slicing his balls off with a ribbon cutter. You will tell him how _HIS DAUGHTER_ _SAVED THE FUCKING CITY-AS SHE WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE DONE-YEARS AGO_. Or did you _forget _the time you found that Hydrogen Bomb in the sewers?"

He calmed down- a bit. " I can't believe you. You've spent four years doing this. Four years! Four. You were fourteen when you came in looking for help. You're eighteen now. You're a hero to half the kids that get dumped here. Hell, you lead the other half-_they _worship the very ground you tread on. And you told him nothing? Fuck kid, that took balls I bet! Super-sharp Jim Gordon, best detective in Gotham City, hoodwinked! By a teenager! Holy shit." He sighed. "You will tell him everything. You will tell him why you've been put in this position. You will explain what your duties are going to be. You will come back here, with him, show him around, have him shake hands with your team and ultimately to us all proud, you hear me?"

Barbara nodded.

"Great. Oh, and congratulations, Lieutenant Gordon." She stared at him blankly as he handed over a chunky piece of metal. "On your promotion. Yes, you've been promoted. Again. Enjoy the fuzzy feeling, it lasts about as long as the brassy finish. That's your new badge. Go pick up your new gear over at the Supply station. Tell your team to report to my office ASAP. Good day."

He walked out of the conference room-and stopped. "Remember, don't fuck this up. There are lives riding on your performance out there. More lives than you'll ever know."

He closed the door, leaving Barbara to stare at the brand new badge in her hands. It was heavy.

**A/N: What is it with me and badass female characters? Dunno, but hey, it's all cool. 'Til next time.**


	4. Interlude: Mistress of Death

Interlude – The Mistress of Death

This is the tale of how Hermione'll get involved in the story.

* * *

Hermione Jane Granger was fifteen when her life changed. It started with Dung Fletcher. Fletcher was what could charitably called an 'odds & ends' man, someone you bought stuff off of on the cheap and, in return for the rather hefty discount, didn't bother with questions such as 'can I get a receipt please' and 'where did you get this?'.

Normally, she wouldn't even have _considered_ buying _anything _off the obnoxious little man. Why, the very _idea_ was stupid. A muggleborn caught with one of Dung's bits & bobs? Azkaban was the least of your worries if it was something valuable the man had lifted.

But this situation patently wasn't normal. She was friends with two boys-Neville Longbottom and Ronald Weasley. Both were Gryffindors-lots of bravery with little in the way of brain to pass around. They were also trouble magnets in the same way the sun could be defined as being somewhat warmer than deep space. She was a special case, too-she was a Gryffindor. With brains to spare. It boggled the mind.

Over the years, her friendship had evolved. It'd gone from casual acquaintance to participation to outright instigation of actions lesser mortals would have seen as questionable. Then again, the challenges the three'd faced would probably be deemed sufficient cause should these actions come to light, even with her blood status being held against her.

So it was, in the summer following her fourth year in Hogwarts, that Hermione Jane Granger was panicking.

The Dark Lord had returned. The man with the brains, the power and the charisma to bring an entire country to its knees with less than a hundred followers standing against upwards of fifty thousand wizards, witches and magical beings had been resurrected by Barty Crouch junior.

And he was gunning for Neville. What happened to Ron and his family a week after the tri-wizard tournament had gone a long way towards proving that Longbottom's friends would do in a pinch too.

Neville was target number one. By extension, _she_ was target number two-not the ministry or Hogwarts, _her_. The itty bitty mudblood.

She started looking for an edge.

Her transaction with Dung started out as an accident. As an 'odds & ends' man working for the Order (which she'd managed to forcibly induct herself into thanks to Ron being turned into a spray of crimson paint coating a substantial portion of Ottery St. Catchpole), she had access to him and the sheer volume of treasures the man'd pinched over the years.

Included in his stash were a set of diaries that were full of scribbles. Hermione, having studied the whole 'parselmouth' thing in second year, knew better. These were journals written in parselscript. Unfortunately, Neville couldn't read it, so she asked Dung if he had a means of translating it at his disposal. Dung said 'sure, 'ere's something that might work' he said, handing the object over.

It was a locket with a green stone sitting on the front. She got it for twelve (twelve!) Galleons.

It worked.

* * *

She used it for twelve months with nobody except Neville curried on to the fact that Hermione was now... Different. Everyone thought she was moody & surly due to Ron being hamburgered and didn't look past that.

Neville, of course, was singularly uninterested in anything other than the war, that damn potions book and Daphne Greengrass. Any of them were annoying enough on their own. Together, it was the goddamn taxi to the dark side.

The parselscript diaries were odd, to say the least. For one, each word written in parsel accounted for about a sentence in English (or Latin, as that was what the locket translated the first diaries into). For two, they weren't, strictly speaking, a chronicle of events more than they were a collection of observations about things stitched together into a rather loose timeline. No dates were ever mentioned and it was only the observations about people, locations and happenings that allowed Hermione to pinpoint when these diaries were written.

Then there were the notations at the bottom of the page. The locket translated them into what seemed to be, at first glance, absolute gibberish, something which intrigued Hermione. The locket didn't _do_ gibberish-what was written down was what was there. So someone had gone through the trouble of writing down what _looked_ like gibberish in parselscript. She needed to know what it was, and so set her mind towards figuring it out.

Three months later, and Hermione wished she hadn't done that.

Lying on her bed in the tower, she panicked as she finally finished the transcription-decoding spell she'd developed for just this purpose and stared down at the result.

The diaries weren't normal diaries. They were _research_ diaries. Everything from dark magic to ritual details (their components, their performance, their expected and actual outcomes) to potions she'd never even _heard_ of were covered in painstaking and often horrific detail. This was textbook dark magic at its finest-there were things mentioned in these pages that no thinking being would voluntarily want to even think about. There was little doubt that if she performed even just one of the spells mentioned in these volumes that she'd be on the fast track to Azkaban. Hell, even just having this information sitting there would probably net her the Kiss. And she had around fifteen books' worth of the stuff sitting in front of her.

So, faced with the reality that anyone finding out that she'd ever even touched upon this subject would mean an automatic death sentence because of how patently dangerous the whole thing was, she set to work studying and learning all of it. Hey, she was a Gryffindor nerd. Dangerous information was her thing. Plus, dead for a penny, dead for a pound and all that rot.

Nobody took notice of her beyond offering condolences whenever they deigned to. Hermione didn't care. She'd come to grips with the Weasley's death in her own way. Now was the time to plot revenge. Her grief had lasted most of the summer and was replaced with a mounting fury at the dearth in both thought & action coming from the ministry on the issue.

Hadn't a prominent pureblood family just been massacred? Hadn't two of the victims been upstanding ministry employees that were held in high regard? Dear Lord, the Dragon Reserve administrators had taken a more active interest in the case than the so-called Dark Wizard Catchers had. No, she knew that the whole thing would be buried beneath a layer of bullshit, just like the hunt for the missing Black scion, just like the reason for why dementors were stationed at Hogwarts (clerical error, apparently, easily solved-by the end of the school year), the robbery at Gringotts, the fucking Basilisk that'd been lurking on school grounds, the attack on the quidditch world cup, Neville's appointment as triwizard champion-just like every other time, the ministry'd wash its hands of the matter.

But nobody hurt her friends and got away with it. _Ever_. With those thoughts in mind, she set to work learning about things she was pretty sure Man wasn't meant to know. She had monsters to kill and it mattered little to her if she became a monster herself as long as Ron could be avenged.

* * *

Lavender Brown, of all people, was the first to suss out just how much Hermione'd changed. But, by then, it was far too late.

* * *

The locket was destroyed in the forest by her after she'd finished transcribing all the notes in the diaries and secured them on her person. _Of_ _course_ she'd known it was a horcrux. It was one of the few magics the diaries'd delved into time and time again. How to make one, destroy one, unravel one, transplant one from one vessel to another... the sheer level of obsession the diaries evidenced _vis-a-vis_ the topic of just such an item meant that she didn't doubt that she could set up & cast the necessary rituals in her sleep if needs must.

Unfortunately, Neville'd cottoned on to her locket before she could unravel the soul within. As did Dumbledore when Neville supposedly exclaimed 'hey, what's Hermione's necklace... thing... doing in here?' in that cave off the coast.

She'd had a lot of explaining to do to Neville after that night. Like how the diaries held some information about horcruxes, but not that much (it was true-multiple horcruxes was a subject she'd never encountered in her studies). Or like why she'd kept the information from him of all people for a bloody year (it was a research project to help him. She was going to come to him with the results sooner or later-probably much later, which was something she didn't add to that sentence). And how this was going to impact their friendship (it wasn't-they'd been horrible people to each other all year round, but they were still the best of friends). Things were pretty dicey until she mentioned just what she had in store for Snape.

The look on Neville's face when he heard of some of the spells his bushy best friend was now capable of casting was a thing of terrifying beauty. He forgave her for her transgressions pretty much on the spot and asked for her patience when it came to 'Daph', which she acceded to with magnanimous grace as long as 'Daph' didn't push her.

Cue the horcrux hunt. And the Battle of Hogwarts. And Hermione coming face to face with the gloating minions of the Dark Lord; Yaxley & the Carrows, the ring-leaders in the Weasley raid according to Snape's scuttlebutt (yes, he was good. Yes, he was forgiven. No, it was complicated.) in the middle of it.

The Battle of Hogwarts would not go down in legend because of the final confrontation between Longbottom and Lord Voldemort. It would not go down in legend for the actions of the children involved.

No, the legend of the Battle became a cautionary tale. Of what, exactly, happens when the best friend of a girl with the mind and power of a Dark Lady is dragged to the gates of Hogwarts castle, forced to kneel in front of the Dark Lord, beg for his fellow students' lives and hit with an _Avada Kedavra_.

Hermione had always been a kind soul. She loved her friends, was loyal to a fault and insanely dedicated when the situation called for it. These were good, valuable, admirable traits that'd served her and her friends in good stead. Hell, she'd even made friends with Greengrass during their time in the tent. But those values, the love, the loyalty, the dedication and the drive to strive to survive also made her a dangerous enemy. The only thing the locket and the diaries had done was give her the knowledge to turn her into a _terrifying _one.

The snap of an anger that'd been built by the sheer frustration of being a muggleborn in the wizarding world, augmented by the innumerable taunts & snide remarks followed by the fawning & ass-kissing, fuelled by the horcrux she'd worn unwittingly for almost two years, brought to a blasting heat by the rumours of the things the ministry'd done with the muggleborn and supercharged by the sight of Ron's killers lounging around as if they'd already won and this was a mere formality was an audible thing that attracted Lavender's attention.

Hermione started the confrontation by putting her wand away. Bringing a gloved hand up in front of her. And snapping her fingers.

The resulting explosion tore the Death Eater ranks apart. Literally. The front of the line disintegrated into a shower of gore with a sickening _splash_ as everything, their bodies, their clothing, their wands, spontaneously and explosively liquefied.

_That_ attracted Lord Voldemort's attention. Well, that and the red glowing eyes staring at him with a fury he'd only ever seen on himself in mirrors before. She snapped her fingers again. Tom's wand slammed forward with a _protego aegis_, deflecting a wave of magic that disintegrated everything it touched. His Death Eaters took to the school's courtyards, eager to get inside and hit the students while they were distracted. Hermione noticed. She hit at the air with the back of her hand and seemed to connect with something as a _slap_ pierced the air. The Death Eaters looking to bypass the furious mudblood went flying back, screaming as the wind that pushed them back burned their uniforms to a crisp. Voldemort was insulted. She was facing _him_ and she would pay attention only to _him_, as it should be.

So he shot a Kedavra her way to get her focus back on him. She whipped out her wand and conjured a bone wall, which didn't disintegrate as it was, technically, alive enough to absorb the curse. She shot a _crucio _at him. He batted the spell away in contempt-and dodged the _diffindo animus_ she'd followed it up with. The spell hit a snatcher in the back of the head. The wizard exploded into ash, his soul severed from reality itself.

Voldemort conjured a copper dome around himself and apparated to the back of his army. That spell had been an interesting choice. Almost as if she- hmm, not completely unexpected. The quiet _pop_ behind him went almost unheard. The harsh tone of the one who'd apparated, however, was a different matter entirely. "_Incendio Daemonix_" She snarled, jabbing her wand forward. A pyroclastic flow screamed into existence, the stream of hot gas & ashes consuming the trolls, werewolves, vampires and ghouls that made up his reserve column without slowing down. She was, however, a touch too late to hit him. He apparated behind her and screamed crucio-only for the beam of pain to _bend around _her. He popped out of there before her retaliatory _kedavra _hit him-leaving Nagini exposed to the bitch's wand. He felt his horcrux and familiar of many years scream in his mind as the mudblood tore through the snake in search of the soul fragment. And what she did to his soul when she found it-it'd made his body shudder. It took less than three seconds to perform the task and, by the time he'd returned, she was back in the courtyard, cradling the corpse of her best friend to her as she fled for the doors. Voldemort flew after her, cutting her off before she was halfway across.

She threw Neville's body away from her with a burst of magic, drew her wand and smirked at him.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle." She whispered. "Was that Nagini?" She jumped over the silent hex he sent her way. "Ah, so you _are_ mortal then. Good to know."

Voldemort snorted as he started circling her. "Do you think, mudblood, that even as a mortal you would stand a chance against me?"

"No." She said in satisfaction. "But _he_ does."

"He? Who-" Which is when the sword of Gryffindor went through his neck from behind.

* * *

It was the day after the Battle of Hogwarts and Hermione was on the run again. Her little display of power hadn't gone unnoticed. Neither had the fact that she'd killed a good dozen upstanding purebloods who just happened to have made some questionable choices (the poor, poor darlings) and close to a hundred Dark creatures in a little under two minutes. The fact that all the people she'd killed were actively trying to kill her at the time was lost on the powers-that-be; she'd turned out to be far more dangerous and daunting a witch than should be allowed and was, therefore, a Dark Lady in training. While Neville Franklin Longbottom was finally enjoying the fruits of victory courtesy of one Daphne Greengrass and Tracy Davis, they came for her.

She didn't go quietly. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The only reason what followed wasn't classified as a battle was because it was hilariously one-sided. One witch took on a dozen aurors, what was left of the contingent of hit-wizards to have survived the ministerial purges and even some misguided former members of the Order of the Phoenix in a fight that stretched from the prefect's bathroom she'd been freshening up in all the way across the grounds of Hogwarts Castle. And won.

She was no Voldemort, however-the foes she faced were forced into a coma, stunned, and generally maimed beyond recognition, but not killed. This would have caused Hermione problems if she had any intention of actually sticking around. Neville was safe & sound in the hands of his girlfriend, the Death Eaters were routed and the ministry was about to fall once more. The war was over. But that didn't mean that the fight was over.

She knew instinctively who'd ordered her arrest. Dolores Umbridge hadn't forgotten the centaurs, which meant that she hadn't forgotten who it was that'd dropped the toad in their laps. Dolores Umbridge had fled the ministry the second word of the battle's outcome had gotten out, dragging her lapdogs with her to the last bastion of safety left-Azkaban. Dolores Umbridge had then ordered Hermione to be arrested and brought to Azkaban. Alive or dead, according to the mind of the snatcher she'd invaded, was deemed optional.

Well, Umbridge would get her wish. Hermione Granger was going to Azkaban. She was alive. But she wasn't going as a prisoner. Well, two out of three wasn't _too_ bad.

Speaking of two out of three, the cloak, the ring and the Elder wand were hers. The cloak'd been in Dumbledore's office, something she immediately recognised as being one of the Deathly Hallows. The wand Voldemort'd wielded was the Elder wand which, while recognising Neville as the one to have killed Voldemort, recognised Hermione as the ultimate instigator of the thing's death thanks to her little distraction. Thus, it was hers.

She'd gotten the location of the stone out of Neville. She'd found it after the battle with the remnants of Umbridge's Ministry.

She was Hermione Jane Granger. She held the Cloak, she was the Wand's mistress and the Stone was safely embedded around her finger.

She was Hermione Jane Granger, Mistress of Death. And she was _pissed_.

Umbridge should have known better. But then again, it was Umbridge.

* * *

It was day two of the post-Voldemort era and Azkaban was burning.

Hermione had known about the rumours surrounding what'd happened to muggleborn caught by the Ministry-they were sent to Azkaban. This was the truth. But not the whole truth.

The _full_ truth was that, for all that this was _the_ prison in charge of keeping British Wizards on the straight & narrow in the same manner that nuclear weapons kept international relations from turning _too_ sour, Azkaban simply didn't have the capacity to handle the influx of muggleborn caught by the Ministry of Magic. This was a prison designed to hold around a hundred, maybe two hundred prisoners for long periods of time. The ministry captured _thousands_ of muggleborn who hadn't made it across the border in time.

They had to deal with them somehow.

And while Hogwarts was quite the exclusive school, the rest of Europe had newer schools for magic that offered to teach British children in both magical and muggle courses. Hermione hadn't gotten an invitation simply because Hogwarts'd wanted her and had, for want of a better word, called dibs.

The first time Hermione Jane Granger met her counterparts who had, for one reason or another, chosen to not attend Hogwarts and go to another school instead, she was standing on the shores of Azkaban and staring at the mountain of bodies being slowly pushed into the sea by Dementors. The bodies were still alive.

Nobody rightly knew what happened next, least of all her. One minute Dementors were pushing people into the sea, the next the upper floor of Azkaban disappeared in a blaze of black fire and the Dementors fled the island.

Umbridge, for all that she'd died at the start of the attack, was still screaming when the waves swallowed what was left of her body. Hermione saw to that.

There were a little over a hundred survivors of Azkaban that Hermione found. She knew others were still stuck in the bowels of the prison, but she couldn't get to them, Dementors or no Dementors. She was running out of time. So she left with the hundred-odd muggleborn in tow.

Clearly, after everything she'd done, Wizarding Britain would come after her. Killing Voldemort was not enough. Not when you put maiming law enforcement officials, destroying Azkaban and helping convicted prisoners, no matter how ridiculous the supposed crime they've been convicted of was, escape on the list of points against allowing her her freedom/life.

The war was over. Her friends, the ones that'd survived, were safe. Her parents were safely out of the country. And she'd just destroyed a prison in the middle of a revolution. Bastille much?

There was no reason to stay and every reason to leave.

That, and she needed to step away from the Dark Magic she could use. That stuff was _dangerous_. And she just knew that staying in Britain would mean ending up addicted to it. Also, being the Mistress of Death probably carried some unpleasant consequences in a place that'd seen so much death recently...

She sighed. Hopefully her cousin Selina could help.


End file.
